Making a point

I know I’ve said this before in a previous post, however recent experiences bear repeating. Recently I have been increasing my level of confidence based on what I see in the mirror. I know that my love handles are shrinking, my gut doesn’t hang out as far, and my face is slowly deflating in the cheeks. However this all came to a shrieking halt when today I saw pictures taken of me at a wedding I attended yesterday. My face looked like it had huge jowls, while sitting down the buttons on my shirt looked like they were straining a bit, and I just didn’t look very flattering.

This all comes at a very inconvenient time for me. I have been slowly developing an attraction for a particular woman, and all of the progress I have been making on my appearance has just served to help me gain confidence in the fact that perhaps I might have a shot with this lovely lady. However no matter if the woman in question doesn’t care what I look like, or might like what’s inside, the point remains that my confidence levels in my appearance and athletic shape are just not good enough to provide a confident boyfriend, or even a confident first date.

I know that many people spout off the fact that you’ll never truly be happy with the way you look, however I personally know that this is a false statement for me. There have been plenty of times in my life where I was extremely happy with what I saw in the mirror, I was at the peak of confidence levels, I had an increasing base of friends that wanted to hang out with me, and I got constant complements from people who hadn’t seen me in a while. This is what I aspire to obtain once again. And the tragic part is that although I’m confident given enough time that I’ll accomplish this goal, the particular female I’m interested in will likely not be on the market long enough for that future version of myself to appear as a potential suitor. I tell myself that there is no one perfect woman, and this is no exception. I know that once I reach my goal there will be plenty of opportunities for me to find a woman that makes me happy, and hopefully finds that same trait in me. But this is little solace to the present version of me. But I march on, slowly, towards an optimistic future.

Current Weight: 277 Pounds

Little bit of evil in all of us

One of the biggest changes besides the obvious physical ones that happens to me i’ve noticed when i’m going through weight loss, is the increase in confidence I get that comes with it. This is a natural thing for me, and for almost anyone who goes through major positive change in their life. Whether it’s getting your PHD, or getting a boob job, people find a level of confidence they didn’t know possible. Sometimes this change is almost too positive and those people develop an unhealthy ego and start to treat those around them in a resentful manner. I can personally say that to some extent this can happen to myself. I know that when I’ve lost weight in the past and become more “attractive”, for whatever that term is worth, that my confidence levels go quite high, and I become a bit more of a sarcastic asshole, I tend to flirt with more attractive women, and don’t glance at girls I may have previously considered. I don’t know if this is a justified reaction to life changes, I just tend to know that this is one way in which I naturally tend to change behaviors. The sad part is though that with increases in confidence and physical attraction, people tend to gravitate towards you in greater numbers, people want to hang out with you more. This all becomes positive reinforcement for those negative behaviors. I think this often times is why they say nice guys finish last, or that high quality women are like apples at the top of the tree that men are afraid to climb to get hurt or some BS like that. Being attractive seems to come with some sort of sense of entitlement, undeserved for those who think it’s superficial. But speaking from someone who has had and lost such a status, it can be an addictive high to ride since it usually ends up with more friends, more sex, and continual complements and flirting from the opposite sex, hell people for some reason also seem to respect you more as a person. What an odd society we live in.

Current Weight: 278 Pounds

Illusory setbacks

When attempting to lose weight, there’s nothing worse than setbacks that hurt the progress you’re making. It extends the amount of time it will take to reach your goals, it picks away at your willpower, and generally puts you in a bad mood. There is another type of setback however. I have deemed this type of setback a “illusory setback”, meaning that it’s not actually a setback, but mimics one. I currently weigh myself daily, and my scale has a wifi connection that uploads my weight and body fat percentage to the web daily, this allows me to keep close track on trends, or when I feel like I’ve not been losing quick enough when i actually have. The drawback to this is nitpicking every day you do or do not lose. I am currently on a diet where it’s practically impossible not to lose fat as long as I stick to it. Today I noticed a small increase in my weight to my dismay. I’m aware that there are water weight fluctuations that happen in the body, and that’s likely the culprit in the small bump, which is why it’s an illusory setback. However typically I still experience 2 of the 3 symptoms of a real setback, it chips a bit at my willpower a bit, and puts me in a bad mood. It’s pretty much impossible to talk myself into just accepting that it’s nothing to be worried about. Unfortunately patience is a virtue that I’ve never been able to really get a handle on.

Current Weight: 282

20% of the way there

Today I am officially 20% of the way to my goal of losing 100 pounds. I wish I could say that I’ve experienced both physical and societal changes due to this milestone, however so far my clothing has only gone from being somewhat tight to no longer as tight. I’ve not dropped any pants size, and although I can see minor changes in my body make up, it’s certainly nothing dramatic. This I believe is one of the hardest stages in any attempt to lose weight. I have made great sacrifices in time, money, and effort and have little more than a number on the scale to reward me. If my memory serves me right however I do recall that the more I weigh the less changes I notice even with large amounts of lost weight. After about 260 I believe every 5 pounds lost tends to make a relatively dramatic change in my body composition. This is one of the things that gets me through my week, it causes me to sacrifice drinking at a bachelor party, or eating a plate of communal cheese fries that everyone is enjoying. It’s posts like these that I hope to be able to go back and reference when I meet my goal, to remind me all the sacrifices I had to make daily to achieve my goal. I am hoping it will provide a deterrent to long periods of poor eating habits and lethargy, but only time will tell. I’ll see if my optimism is rewarded in 20 more pounds.

Current Weight: 280 Pounds

It’s never fast enough

I sit here day after day getting introduced to women whom I find attractive on multiple levels, they’re smart, funny, and have ambition. The sad problem is that even though I myself believe I have a good sense of humor, and a pretty decent personality, I rarely get a second glance from them. They’re always scanning the room for someone more physically appealing.  We as a society seem to disapprove of superficiality, and yet it exists and we don’t even attempt to deny it exists. I myself don’t have a problem with limited superficiality, it’s simply one piece in a whole pie that makes up someone or something. I think we can agree that if the single most important consideration factor is appearance, that’s when most people object. There is a problem however, when dating, or attempting to date, appearance is the only thing most people tend to spend the brief few second in their head deciding if someone is worth their time. If that person approaches them and has a great personality, and a great sense of humor of course more can develop, but that’s not the majority of interactions.

My point though is a bit of a digression, because I know such an environment exists, and since I believe I have decent depth of character, a modicum of charm, a good sense of humor, and am physically tall, the biggest problem I have with my outward appearance is my weight. As I go through my personal journey to correct this “flaw” I still interact and meet new women that would easily fit into my criteria of women I would like to take out for drinks, or get to know better, but my appearance doesn’t give them reciprocal feelings yet. The torturous part is knowing that I am doing all that is possible to change my situation, and with enough willpower will eventually reach my goal, but as Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part. A piece of me wishes that I could freeze time and live out the next 6 months with no interactions or changes to the outside world so that I would be in a changed position. I have no problem doing the work, as my situation is of my own doing, but seeing fruit just out of reach is heartbreaking at times. It’s a unique source of discouragement, and one that sadly breeds a bit of personal disdain in my own mind. I can easily see myself doing the exact same thing should I become one of those “desirable” people, ignoring those that themselves have not gone on such a journey, and the cycle of pain continues. I have no solution for this, and instead am merely a passenger on the boat, hoping to eventually reach the side of the lake with the greener pasture. But it remains that I will feel bad for those who were not able to cross the lake, even if I myself become a hypocrite.

Current Weight: 280 Pounds

Hotness quotient

I got to thinking today about something related to my current journey. For lack of a better term I’m going to refer to it as the Hotness Quotient, or HQ for short. I hypothesize that for any guy that doesn’t have a completely repulsive face (I’m speaking in brutal general terms so as to make my point, I’m fully aware beauty is in the eye of the beholder and everyone is attractive in their own way, blah blah blah), or any other major physical deformities, they can reach a level of HQ that would make them physically attractive to the general population of women. I’m not saying women are superficial, I’m not even saying that the women would all date this guy, personality and other traits play a part here. I’m speaking more directly to that physical level of base level animal attraction that we judge when we see someone we’ve never met.

I’m going to throw some arbitrary and completely non scientific numbers out there and say that a guy with an HQ of 50 is an average joe, not too skinny, not too fat, no defining muscle, no major acne, etc… Below 50 we have beanpole guys at probably a HQ of 40, heavy guys at an HQ of 30, and obese guys around 20 (Below that are guys that have given up on personal grooming or hygene, and just don’t care about their personal health). On the other end of the scale we have a 60 with perhaps a little bit of muscle tone in their arms, but no defined abs, perhaps the tiniest gut that gives them that teddy bear look with strong arms, a 70 has a flat stomach, defined biceps, and no hint of a double chin, a 80 has defined arms, defined chest, an very low body fat, and a 90 is all of what you get with an 80 but with the addition of washboard abs. (100 would require other things like symmetrical face, strong jaw, tight ass, and just low enough body fat not to show any veins)

So having defined these scales I’m wondering at what HQ a guy would have to get to, to attract girls of a the general 1-10 scale that is often given to women purely based on looks. Now i’m not going to go into each rating of a female, but for the sake of argument, lets pose at what HQ a guy would have to be, to almost without fail be considered physically attractive by a girl with an 8 rating or below (above that and you get problems with gold diggers, spoiled girls that bounce from guy to guy, etc…). I honestly don’t know the answer to this question, but if I had to make a guess, I’d say it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 75-80. A guy with an HQ of 50 can most certainly get an 8 rated girl if he has a good sense of humor, or a great personality, but for the sake of this situation I’m trying to single out first physical impression.

Most guys will never have an HQ of above a 70 if my current observation of the populous is accurate, but for those guys out there with stellar personalities, who are not born with a great HQ and were forced to develop depth of character, if they could one day essentially become extremely desirable simply by increasing their HQ to a 75-80 level. Why did I write this long post? I’m curious what would happen if I managed to actually achieve an HQ of 75 sometime in my life….

Current Weight: 283 Pounds

Closet full of clothes

It’s funny how there are 2 times when your closet can be full of clothes and yet you wear a small portion of them (I guess there could be more times but in my case these are the 2 biggies). The first is when you’ve had to keep buying clothes to keep up with your increasing waistline. You try to buy as few pieces of clothing as you can because you tell yourself that you’ll lose this extra weight and be able to fit back into your old clothes. I have done this on a few occasions, and it’s a terrifying day when you only have that one pair of jeans (since its warmer out and I normally wear shorts) and the button flies off. I hate having to go back to replace that pair of pants that I told myself wouldn’t be in my wardrobe for very long.

The second time is when you’ve lost a lot of weight and you have all your “fat clothes” still around. They’re too big to wear with a belt lest you look like you’re wearing a potato sack, but a tiny piece of you knows that history tells you that you’re going to gain that weight back. This is a far more favorable situation to be in, and when in a pinch you can wear your fat clothes when it’s laundry day. (If i wore my skinny clothes on laundry day when I was fat, my roommate might be disturbed)

I will say that one of the benefits of having a whole timeline of jeans in graduated sizes is that it’s one more way I can judge my weight loss as time passes. Sadly this often times can be a disturbing reality when you realize initially how many pounds you seem to have to lose in order to drop a pants size. I believe at my weight i’d have to drop 15-20 pounds per pants size, whereas at about 230 pounds or so it’s somewhere between 5-10 pounds. The benefit is an almost accelerated perspective of loss if you use pants sizes to measure. Lets hope this time next year I’ll be suffering from the first of my two examples, instead of the latter as I am now.

Current Weight: 283 Pounds

What you see is what you get? Not quite.

As I look into the mirror as I slowly slim down, it looks to me that my look is improving at a decent rate. The next day I appear in a photograph with some friends and feel as if nothing I’ve done up to this point has changed my look. Why does the medium of photography create such cruel representations of ourselves? How is looking in a mirror any different than the captured light refraction in a camera?

I can count on one finger the amount of times I’ve taken a picture of myself and was extremely pleased with what I saw. This was about 2 or 3 years ago when I was down to a trim 212 pounds and had at least a moderate amount of muscle tone on my body. I felt so vein taking a picture at the time, but now I’m glad I did, as it reminds me that what I see in the mirror or a photograph right now doesn’t have to stay that way.

Current Weight: 282 Pounds

Enthusiasm has diminishing returns

There are more times in my life than I can count where I said to myself “I’m going to change my life through taking control of my weight”. And granted there are at least a handful of times in my life where that ended up being true. There are probably 4 or 5 big periods in my life where I was able to stick through it, change my life, and ultimately benefit from the fruits of my labor. People complemented me, girls were more attracted to me, tight spaces were easier to get through. The problem with this is that you have both enthusiasm in knowing that you’re capable of such change, but knowing that you ultimately reverted to your current state eventually puts a damper on your efforts. Sure I tell myself that once I’m back at an ideal weight or body composition, that the memory of how bad it was being overweight will be enough motivation for me to maintain my healthier lifestyle. WRONG! There has to be another way of looking at your life once you’ve hit a goal. I do my best losses when there is some sort of singular goal in my mind other than the weight itself. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s usually for a girl that I’d like to ask out, or for the general idea that it’d be nice to have sex again sometime in the near future. Lots of people will tell you that to be successful you have to do it for yourself, that’s bullshit. I’m sorry, but if I’m not really getting winded walking up stairs, or not having trouble keeping up with friends when we go out walking or hiking, there’s not THAT great of an incentive to make such drastically limiting factors to my life.

Personal health is something I take serious, and to that end I don’t smoke, I don’t eat that much sugar, I don’t drink regular soda, I don’t sit down and play video games that much, I stay away from heavy meals of things like pasta, and yet I gain weight on a diet of anything more than about 1500 calories, even when my life is not very sedentary (I keep a pedometer on me at all times and track my activity levels. I do strength training 3 days a week religiously, and generally try to live a healthy life. Therefore I tend to have great satisfaction in the strides that I take to try and maintain a healthy lifestyle, I do these things for myself, so when it comes to losing weight, how much more am I doing it for myself?  A horse without a whip or carrot will be hard to get to a particular destination. I can say for certain that my first great success came when I spent a year getting in shape for my senior prom so that I would have the confidence to ask a girl out for it. It worked. In college after some weight came back on it felt like I was the only one around that wasn’t having any sex. I lost a bunch of weight and guess what? Yep I ended up in a threesome with 2 cute girls. There are more examples such as spite for an ex that broke up with me ultimately leading to weight loss and a new girl in my life, but you get the point.

I think ultimately I’m at the point in my life where my “carrot” is the idea of meeting a great woman whom I can try to maintain a healthy lifestyle with, get married, have healthy children, and be able to live a long and healthy life watching them grow up. If that’s not a carrot that encompasses both doing it for someone else (meeting a great girl), and doing it for myself (the rest), then I don’t know what else I can incentivize myself with.

Current Weight: 288 Pounds

Everything seems to revolve around food

It seems that whenever you’re dieting you start to notice that so much of your week seems to revolve around food. Even if you manage to adopt the mantra of Eat to Live instead of Live to Eat, you’re still frequently put into situations where willpower can be tested. This week for instance I saw a movie where I managed to abstain from popcorn or candy, and a lunch invite with coworkers today that I passed up to eat the healthier lunch I brought, but the rest of the week just simply doesn’t look so promising. Tomorrow i’m supposed to go out for a weekly bout of “Wingsday”, and Thursday is likely a meet up at a bar. Heck Cinco de Mayo i was eating nachos with friends and drinking margaritas. It seems like no matter where I turn, events revolve around food. It’s easy to see how many people can lose control of their weight when so much of our cultural social events involve eating. Heck my friend even asked if i wanted to grab a quick bite before the movie. 

It’s hard to have the willpower to simply eat better on your own, but being constantly having opportunities put in front of you…. It’s a nightmare sometimes. Imagine being an alcoholic and constantly having people invite you out to bars. Oh well, nothing that’s worth it comes easy.

Current Weight: 294 Pounds